Special LMNN Seminar // Molecular Imaging – Benefits of a Mass Spectrometry - Based Approach

Molecular mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) combines the chemical specificity and parallel detection possibility of mass spectrometry (MS) with microscopic imaging capabilities. Molecular MSI is therefore an emerging research field to detect intact molecules (analyte profiling) and visualize their spatial distribution (analyte imaging).
The utilization of “soft ionization” techniques as matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) allows the desorption and subsequent ionization of intact large, surface-located (bio-) molecules to determine their exact molecular weights by MS. Compared with many conventional MS approaches for cellular protein and peptide characterization MALDI MS based profiling includes (a) the compatibility with crude mixtures, (b) minimal sample clean up, (c) no need for tagging or pre-selecting of the analyte, (d) high sensitivity, (e) as a very important fact complementary information to spectroscopic or immunological methods and (f) identification by tandem MS.
The presentation will introduce you to the field of MSI. It will show that experiments can be designed to selectively map peptides, proteins, lipids, glycans or metabolites as well as administered pharmaceuticals.